


The Warmest Wind

by crushingblue



Category: Kimi to Boku | You and I
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Sakura (Cherry Blossoms), Sentimental, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 01:57:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16734852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crushingblue/pseuds/crushingblue
Summary: Shun contemplates the coming of spring in his first year at university, and gets an unexpected message.





	The Warmest Wind

Cherry blossoms float down through the spring air, and my hand instinctively moves out to catch them, gently breaking their fall on the way down to the ground. I look down at the gradient of the colors, the veins running along the petal, their gentle curl at one edge. Memories bubble up, but before they can fully form in my mind a gust of not-quite-warm air softly removes the blossom from my hand, and I am left looking at the empty lines of skin there instead.

Each year, the cherry blossoms are the same. They fall along these tree-lined university paths now just as they did along the streets leading to my high school, my middle school, my kindergarten. As far back in memory as I can go, they still fall and float down gently to many different pavements. The cherry blossoms do not change, only the hand that catches them, growing in size and deepening in age.

Then, at least, it marked a transition between one thing and another. The start of a new school year, the arrival of new friends and a chance to meet old ones again. Going to a university away from the others was hard enough, but one with a western class schedule, too? Spring marks no transition here, only a second-semester happenstance, pretty but meaningless. Everyone knows I enjoy pretty things, but not everyone seems to recognize I enjoy pretty things that are meaningful as well.

Sometimes people call me sentimental for that. I'm not sure exactly why they mean it as a bad thing. Should I go through life weighing logic and reason, not listening to the voice inside me that calls out for something beyond them? Do they want me to ignore the capacity for love and friendship inside me so as to become a better student or salaryman? That might be better for my bank account, but I don't think I could be happy like that. Maybe they could, and that's okay. But they are not the types of people who participate in tea ceremonies; they are the types that are bored to tears during them. Both types of people are necessary to make the world go round. I know which kind I am, though.

I feel a buzzing in my pocket and stop along the side of the lane to retrieve my phone. It's a text from Chizuru with no words, only a picture of his outstretched hand containing a single cherry blossom.

It's only a few seconds later, lost in thought, that I realize the picture is a little blurry, through tears in my eyes that I don't remember crying.

"Shun-chan! Don't cry!" says a familiar voice.

I look up and see a familiar, straw-colored blob running towards me.

"Chizuru-kun?"

I barely have a chance to wipe my eyes with my jacket sleeve before he wraps his arms tight around me, pinning my other arm in place. "I was gonna sneak up on you with a bunch of pictures and surprise you, but I didn't mean to make you cry, I'm so sorry Shun-channn!"

His warm face feels good against my chest, and I pull him close affectionately once I get past the initial shock of seeing him here at all.

"If you cry then I gotta cry too," he says, face buried in my jacket. "So don't."

"What are you doing here, Chizuru-kun? Don't you have class?"

He looks up at me, suddenly pouting. "Oh, you'd rather me study than visit you. I see."

I laugh and correct him. "No, no, Chizuru-kun! I'm very happy to see you. I was only curious."

"So that's how it is," he says, not acknowledging having heard me whatsoever. "No time for an old friend who cut class to come see you. You're so cold, Shun-chan."

I resist the urge to scold him for cutting class, which would do no good with him. I know from experience that there is only one way to break him out of this mood.

"Well if you bothered coming all the way here, would you like to go try the ramen shop up the street?"

His pouting face evaporates like a puddle after a spring shower, and he bounces forward, excited. I follow after him, bouncing a little more in my own step. His energy is contagious, and his smile always was a cure for so many sadnesses.

I don't even have the heart to tell him that the ramen shop is in the other direction. Well, I can still steer him there eventually. It's okay – he won't notice.

Whatever lanes we walk down, wherever we go, and however long it takes to reach wherever it is we are going, there will be cherry blossoms there to greet us: ones in the spring air, and ones only in memory. The first carry possibility, the sense of something changing for the better; the latter carry history, the weight of blossoms that fell that one time, a while ago, when things were different, and that you wish you could go back to sometimes, in the long nights of winter, when the burden of possibility seems too much to bear.

But the past and the future are not different things, really. They intertwine in ways you can never predict – until it comes running up the path to greet you, unbidden.

Chizuru turns around to look at me quizzically. "Did you just grab my hair?"

"Nope," I say, smiling angelically at him. "It must have been the wind."

"Hmph," he replies, apparently satisfied. And once he turns around, I let the blossom I plucked from his hair, held at my back, flutter down to the ground behind us.

The past must stay in the past, but we create it with every step, with every blossom falling into our memories. And there they stay, to spread roots and bloom, whenever the warm winds blow again in our lives.

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished mainlining both seasons of Kimi to Boku over the last few weeks and I absolutely loved these two, both so sunny and happy in very different ways. I just had to write something with both of them in it.
> 
> Hopefully someone sees this and enjoys it! And if you're reading this, maybe you did! Thank you for reading!


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